Irish Examine view: End of the party for Conservatives?

Liz Truss who resigned on Thursday after only 44 days in the job. Picture: Kirsty O'Connor/PA 

All the column centimetres of coverage of the high jinks in the British parliament — it ran to well over a metre in Friday's Irish newspapers — shows that we have some anxiety about what is happening, or that it’s a welcome distraction with comic sub-plots worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan. Or both.

But amid all the schadenfreude and lofty superiority, an essential point has been missed. We may be witnessing something historically epic in British politics — the collapse of the Conservative Party and its splintering into mutually incompatible components for many years to come.

Since 1922, the country has been led by Tory prime ministers in 72 out of 100 years. Barring an unconscionable own goal by Keir Starmer or the trade union movement the current occupation of Downing Street will end, sooner or later. Support for the Blues is at its lowest level ever. Just 14% of the electorate have declared themselves willing to vote in their favour in the latest opinion poll. What we can hear from across the sea is a death rattle.

The Conservative party could splinter into centrists, who have something in common with Labour given there is very little difference in economic policy. Then there will be a pro-European cadre, and a harder right who will be hawkish on the EU and illegal immigration, something over which there is considerable dissatisfaction and tension among traditional supporters.

British politics was once dominated by the Whigs and the Tories until internal divisions saw the Whigs transmute into the Liberal Party and others of their number join the Conservatives as Liberal Unionists. The Whigs are no more, broken on the back of the issue of Irish Home Rule.

Which leads us to what will happen to the Northern Ireland Protocol and the ambitions for a united country in the teeth of the fissures opening within what used to call itself “the natural party of government”. Ireland’s best hopes of progress may rely on a Labour victory at a general election. And soon.